Making Languages More Comprehensible

Game Of Quotes

This activity was shared quite some time ago. I didn’t look into it at the time, and just sent myself an email for whenever I had the chance. That chance was last week.

This game rules.

In short, it promotes reading, and highlights titles from your Free Voluntary Reading (FVR) library at the same time. Plus, even students who “don’t want to do the work” have a role that ends up bringing them into the fold (see below, *in bold*). This was my process for our team game after 10 minutes of independent reading (Free Reading Friday), also included in the Slides presentation you’ll find at the bottom of this post:

Students hold onto their books, forming teams (3+).

A prompt is revealed (e.g. “something you yell when you stub your toe”), then everyone has a minute or so to look for a word/phrase/quote from their book silently/independently.

Each student shares with their team. *Students who didn’t choose anything open to a random page and read a random sentence.*

After a count-off, teams vote for their favorite quote by pointing to whomever read it. Most votes wins.

Winner from each team shares their quote with the whole class.

A judge chooses best overall quote. That team gets a point, and becomes the next judge. Teacher chooses first judge to get things rolling.

Laugh and continue.

The process I listed above is a simple team-based version of the game I adapted from Jessie Oelke, with the presentation entirely in English. I figured that I’d end up spending more time trying to establish meaning of the prompts in Latin than we’d actually get to playing the game (i.e. students processing some input from their books). Otherwise, there’s this page from Senora Chase along with some Slides in various languages, as well as a longer story-based form of the game. You could always just collect a bunch of prompts that students create (much like Discipulus Illustris questions).